Loaner cat

We're taking care of a cat while a friend of ours is away - it's here at the house for the next couple of weeks. It's fun having another thing running around, although it's already served as an unwanted alarm clock this morning :)

I'll post pictures eventually... (it's soooo cute! heh)

Winter Percussion line is set

As of late Tuesday we made the final decisions for our winter percussion group members: 3 snares, 2 tenors, 5 basses, 4 cymbals, and 10 pit. It's a really good group of kids, and it should be a good year for us.

We're playing "Country Band March" as our main tune, which is an amazing piece. I wish I could have played it in a group at some point :) I need to be writing the music for it, but so far I've been procrastinating. Part of the reason was to see what the players would be able to handle, which is why we spent December doing auditions for the kids, and the other part is that I've been playing too many video games :)

We rented the Incredibles game for PS2 the other week, which was pretty fun. It's the first 'action' game I've played for a while - Lisa and I play a fair amount of Frequency and Amplitude, but they are very different from a standard action game. I bought it for our computers, but we haven't played yet because.... we're playing a lot of Katamari Damacy, a very cool, addictive, fun, (and very Japanese) game that we're borrowing from Justin. In the game you control a ball where things you roll over stick to it, and you try to increase the size of the ball as fast as you can, or grab certain types of objects. It has what I call "tank style" controls, where you use the analog buttons to move - pushing both forward moves you forward, one forward and one back rotates, etc. The controls work decently well once you get used to it. It may sound pretty weird, but I haven't met a person yet that has played the game and didn't like it. Check it out if you get a chance.

Ok, back to thinking about percussion music...

Experiences with Subversion

I've been meaning to setup a CVS server on my machine for my programming projects, and this weekend I finally got around to it. Well, actually I set up subversion. I started on Friday night, got it working on Saturday, broke it, and got it working again tonight. So far it has been broken more than it has worked :)

I posted a couple of links to del.icio.us that I used, if you're interested. I started by grabbing the disk images from Fred's iDisk. I was a little surprised that you have to install them all, but that turns out to be the case. I followed bits of the instructions from the other links, and I got it to work after lots of fumbling about.

I created a repository for a project, checked it back out, setup Xcode to use it, and did some modifications. At some point after that my powerbook decided not to wake from sleep, which has happened a few times since I've gotten it. And after that Xcode was reporting every file as a conflict, and any terminal commands were acting strange. After poking around in the documentation and searching on the web, I figured I should try repairing the repository. After that I needed to re-fix the permissions on the database to get it working again.

I'm not all that encouraged by my experiences so far, hopefully I've worked through my share of problems for a while. Let me know if anyone else has any interesting experiences with it...

LiveJournal account

I just created a LiveJournal account because I'm tired of not being able to comment in Fraser's blog :) (he has anonymous posting turned off). I bet you can't guess what the name of it is. If only there was some way I could give you a hint.

Having the account also has the added benefit of letting me read "friends" posts from people on LJ (at least that's how I think it works). I don't plan to post anything over there, so don't bother ever checking it :)

Trying out ecto

I'm trying out ecto for my blog posts now, starting with the previous one. The trial period for MarsEdit ran out, and I'm not too compelled to spend money on an app if I still have to log in to blogger to set the title (the MarsEdit website says it will support it "eventually", I just wish I knew when that would be).

Anyway, we'll see how it goes in the next couple of weeks. What app(s) are other people using to post these days? Anyone? Ethan?

Amazon rules!

I just got a email from Amazon about the Nirvana boxed set I got Lisa for her birthday. After ordering it online I was disappointed to see it quite a bit cheaper at Target a couple days later, but it was too late to cancel it at that point. I was a little disappointed that I paid more for it, but worse things have happened.

But in this email, they mention that they now offer the set for a lower price, and they are crediting me the difference - without me having to bring it up. That's really cool!

In IA for Xmas

I forgot to mention the end result from my last posting. I'll flying on the 22nd and 30th, and I should be around town most of the days in between. Drop me an email if you'll be around.

Buying plane tickets online (sucks!)

I finally got around to buying my plane tickets for Christmas yesterday, and because of that I plan to avoid buying tickets again for as long as possible. (Here comes the rant)

Now I know I should have bought these tickets a while ago, but it just didn't happen. The time was...

3pm - I searched around trying to find a ticket that would cost less than $900 and wouldn't require me to be in IA for half of December, and... it wasn't easy. My dates to get back home were pretty flexible, so I tried a bunch of different combinations to see what would be a good fit. This took a while, but I expected that. It's too bad there isn't a tool that can give you that sort of info faster... searching with the "my dates are flexible" button on websites never seems to give me any good results...

3:15 - I've plotted all the prices, figured out when it is cheap enough that it would be worth flying out of SFO, and pretty much decided the dates - within a day or two. I'd heard that buying tickets directly from the airlines was sometimes cheaper, so I found my flight on travel.yahoo.com and then searched for those days on American Airlines' website (I'm not going to link to these, because I'm still pissed about the whole thing). American's website had tickets for those days for about $150 less, so I was happy and started the process of buying them. By the 3rd step in their six step process, things weren't looking good - it was asking me to enter my passenger info, but it wasn't showing any fields for me to use. After trying it a couple of times, I figure there's a problem with Safari - so I load up the same thing in IE. I get the same tickets at the same price, and when I get to the passenger info page, it wants me to log in. Of course I don't have an account, so I have to create one. It takes about 5 minutes, and when I'm done it doesn't take me back to my flight info.

3:30 - I search again, and... oh look - the price just went up by $50. Great. It's still cheaper, so I continue entering my info... credit card info, billing info, ticket delivery, etc. I click 'continue' after entering the things in step 5 (note: step 6 is 'finished). The browser takes a long time to reload things, and when it's done I'm back at step 1, where it says "there was an error booking the flight, please choose another". Grrr.

3:40 - I search again, and find the same flight. Maybe it was just a server error. I go through all the steps again. Step 5 leads directly to..... step 1. Same error.

3:50 - (this would all be faster if their websites would rerender the next page in less than 30 seconds. Using IE wasn't helping). I search again, and find the same flight. But I don't choose that one. I found another flight for about the same price. Repeat all steps. Unfortunately, that included getting the same error.

4:00 - OK. Maybe it's a Mac browser/java/voodoo thing. I try it on Lisa's PC.

4:15 - Nope. Same problem there. I try it again while I call American on the phone. I'm initially impressed by the voice recognition software that asks me for flight info, and actually gets my responses right. It says I can say "agent" at any time to get out of this system, but it was working fine so far. Until it asks me for my account number, and gets 50% of the characters wrong. I try again, still gets it wrong. Again; wrong. "Agent"; "I didn't understand your response". "Agent"; "I didn't understand your response". "AGENT!!"; "One more time... I didn't understand your response". I silently fume. It puts me on hold. Around this time the website gives me the same error again.

4:25 - I am on hold. Some lady gets on the other end of the phone, and tries to find the flights I wanted. At some point I mention that these are United flights that were listed on the American website. The only flights she can find for me are $900+, and all the cheaper flights are booked. She can't find the flights I mentioned, since they aren't as easy to find in their system. She recommends that I try United's site, since American evidently has bad information about the United flights, despite the fact that they are listed on the American website. She offers to transfer me to tech support for the website, but I can't imagine that would get me any closer to a flight. I thank her for trying, since it isn't really her fault that their system sucks.

4:40 - I've given up on American Airlines website (and phone number), and I'm back to travel.yahoo.com. It will be more expensive, but at least it should _work_. And after a short detour from my forgotten password, it did, and I had my tickets by 5pm.

The internet. Making our lives more pleasant every day.